Schopenhauer's Aesthetics

First published Wed May 9, 2012

The focus of this entry is on Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory,
which forms part of his organic philosophical system, but which can be
appreciated and assessed to some extent on its own terms (for ways in
which his aesthetic insights may be detached from his metaphysics see
Shapshay, 2012b). The theory is found predominantly in Book 3 of
the World as Will and Representation (WWR I) and in the
elaboratory essays concerning Book 3 in the second volume (WWR II), and
it is on these texts that I will concentrate here. This entry
offers a brief background on Schopenhauer's metaphysics before
addressing Schopenhauer's methodology in aesthetics, his account
of the subjective and objective sides of aesthetic experience (both of
the beautiful and the sublime), his hierarchy of the arts and rationale
for this hierarchy, his view of artistic genius, the exceptional status
of music among the fine arts, and the relationships he theorized
between aesthetics and ethics.

By the 1870s, Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy had gained, in
Nietzsche's words “ascendency in Europe” (GM
III, §5). Indeed, late-19th and
early-20th century philosophers, writers, composers and
artists such as Nietzsche, Wagner, Brahms, Freud, Wittgenstein,
Horkheimer, Hardy, Mann, Rilke, Proust, Tolstoy, Borges, Mahler, Langer
and Schönberg were influenced by Schopenhauer's
thought. Recognition came late in his life, however,
starting only in 1853 with the publication of a review article by J.
Oxenford. Until then, Schopenhauer labored in relative obscurity,
despite the publication of numerous works such as: On the Fourfold
Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (his doctoral
dissertation published in 1813, revised 1847), On Vision and
Colors (1816), his magnum opus The World as Will and
Representation (1818/9; second, revised edition with a second
volume of essays 1844), On the Will in Nature (1836), On
the Freedom of the Will (which won a prize from the Royal
Norwegian Society of Sciences in 1839), On the Basis of Morals
(which did not win the prize from the Danish Royal Society of
Sciences despite its being the only entry for the competition), and two
volumes of Parerga and Paralipomena (1851).

What many luminaries of European culture found gripping in
Schopenhauer's thought was his doctrine of the world as having
two aspects related to each other as two sides of the same coin: (1) an
ultimate foundation as “will”—a blind, purposeless urge or
striving akin to energy—which he identified with the Kantian thing in
itself (for competing interpretations of the argument for this
identification see: Atwell 1995; Janaway 1989, 1999a; Young,
1987; DeCian & Segala 2002; Cartwright 2001; Jacquette 2007;
Shapshay 2008; and Wicks 2008); and (2) a world of
representation, i.e., the will qua thing in itself as it
“objectifies” itself and appears to human beings through
their shared mode of cognitive conditioning.

Schopenhauer held that the character of the will qua thing in
itself—blind urge—expresses itself in the perpetual strivings
of living creatures and in the forces of inorganic matter.
Grounding his proto-Darwinian philosophy of nature in his metaphysics
and the empirical sciences of his day, Schopenhauer viewed nature as an
arena where living beings compete to survive and procreate, where
species adapt to environmental conditions, and, most emphasized by
Schopenhauer, where sentient beings suffer as virtual
slaves to their will to life [Wille zum
Leben].

Schopenhauer's metaphysics and philosophy of nature led him to
the doctrine of pessimism: the view that sentient beings, with
few exceptions, are bound to strive and suffer greatly, all without any
ultimate purpose or justification and thus life is not really worth
living. This is a view that has seldom been defended in the history of
Western thought and became a potent philosophical problem for
Nietzsche and atheist existentialists.

Mitigating his pessimism somewhat, Schopenhauer does see a salutary
role for the intellect in human life. He identifies three main
ways in which the intellect breaks free to some degree from the
servitude to the will and its attendant egoism: (1) in aesthetic
experience and artistic production, (2) in compassionate attitudes and
actions, and (3) in ascetic resignation from embodied existence.
In each of these three ways of being in the world, a subject exercises
varying degrees of freedom from the will to life, a freedom which is
inextricably bound up with a degree of “intuitive
knowledge” of the world, or, as Wittgenstein would later put it,
of “seeing the world aright.” Thus, the mode of being of
the aesthetic perceiver, the artist, the compassionate agent, and the
ascetic saint each has moral value in virtue of their possessing a
degree of true understanding of the world, which enables the attainment
of a degree of freedom from ordinary egoism, and which leads them to
not add to—or possibly to diminish—the amount of suffering in the
world.

As with his philosophy as a whole, Schopenhauer takes his point of
departure in aesthetics from Kant, praising him for deepening the
subjective turn in philosophical aesthetics and thereby putting it on
the right path (WWR I, Appendix, 560–61. Note: page
references to vol. I refer to the Cambridge edition translation;
references to vol. II to the Payne transl.). Like Kant, he
held that the phenomenon of beauty would only be illuminated through a
careful scrutiny of its effects on the subject, rather than by
proceeding in the pre-Kantian objectivist fashion, searching out the
properties of objects—such as smoothness, delicacy and
smallness—which putatively give rise to the feeling of the
beautiful. But the subjective turn is as far as Kant's
aesthetic-methodological merit extends, according to Schopenhauer: it is too indirect, due to Kant's primary method in
philosophy, the transcendental argument.

Applied to the phenomenon of beauty in the Critique of the Power
of Judgment, Kant starts from an analysis of the judgments that
the subject makes about the objects of experience, e.g., “this
rose is beautiful.” After offering an analysis of the logic of
such aesthetic judgments—that they are based on feeling, more
particularly on a feeling of disinterested pleasure, but that they also
claim universal subjective validity—Kant then searches for the
a priori conditions for the possibility of making judgments
that have this logical form.

By contrast, Schopenhauer does not believe that the aesthetician
should start from the aesthetic judgment, but rather from
immediate aesthetic experience, before the subject attempts to
formulate judgments about that experience (WWR I, 530–531). The advocacy of this
focus, rather than Kant's focus on judgments, has to do with the
ways in which Schopenhauer departs from Kant's epistemology. Very
briefly, the key issue has to do with the status of non-conceptual
knowledge. As Kant famously held, “[t]houghts without
content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”
(A50–51/B74–75). Schopenhauer adheres to the first clause, but holds
that there is indeed what today philosophers might call
“non-conceptual content,” and what he referred to variously
as “intuitive cognition” [intuitive Erkenntniß],
“knowledge of perception” [anschauliche
Erkenntniß] or “feeling” [das
Gefühl]. This cognition allows us—and many non-human
animals—to navigate and operate in the world to a great extent without
concepts. Furthermore, for Schopenhauer, this is the kind of knowledge
we gain, par excellence, through aesthetic experiences of
nature and art; but this knowledge is not or at least not-yet
conceptual, though it is a knowledge of the “Platonic
Ideas” or essential features of the phenomenal world (more
on the Ideas at section 3.2).

In order to preserve for ourselves or to communicate
“intuitive knowledge” to others, we may try to
show it or say it. If one is an artist, one might
show such knowledge by attempting to embody it in a work of art. But
for non-artists, trying to ‘say’ this knowledge means
attempting to capture it propositionally, and in so doing, for
Schopenhauer, we translate intuitive into conceptual knowledge
by a process of abstraction. Unfortunately, something is inevitably lost in the
translation. Thus, Schopenhauer concludes, Kant's starting
point—the aesthetic judgment—is already at one remove from true
aesthetic experience. And since this remove is not innocuous, insofar
as the judgment does not faithfully transmit the richness of the
experience, the aesthetic judgment constitutes the wrong focus for
aesthetic theorizing.

Fundamentally, however, the gap between aesthetic experience and
aesthetic judgments yields an essential difficulty for aesthetic
theories since these are necessarily formulated propositionally,
and therefore cannot entirely capture the richness of immediate,
first-personal aesthetic experience. To his credit, Schopenhauer
is quite frank about the methodological limits of aesthetic theorizing,
especially in the case of music (WWR I, section 52; see also Goehr
1998; and section 5.2.5 below). Nonetheless, he ventures forth to offer
just such a theory in the hopes that through it he may convince the
reader of the “importance and high value of art (which are seldom
sufficiently recognized)” (WWR I, 294) and to help the reader
enter a psychological space where she herself can gain the deep
insights afforded by nature and the fine arts.

Aesthetic experience comes in two main varieties for Schopenhauer,
the beautiful and the sublime, and can be had through perception of
both nature and art. Although 18th century aesthetics
also included the “picturesque,” this drops out as a
separate category in both Kant and Schopenhauer's aesthetic
theories.

Nearly all human beings, he holds, are capable of aesthetic
experience, otherwise they would be “absolutely insensitive to
beauty and sublimity—in fact these words would be meaningless for
them” (WWR I, 218). Notwithstanding this nearly universally
shared capacity for aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer remarks that it
is enjoyed only occasionally by the majority of people and is enjoyed
in a very sustained manner and to a high degree only by the genius.
There are two jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for any
properly aesthetic experience, one subjective and one objective.

Ordinary cognition, according to Schopenhauer, is bound up with the
individual's will, that is to say, with one's generally
egoistic strivings, and is subordinate to the four forms of the
“principle of sufficient reason” (PSR), the principle which
holds that nothing is without a reason for why it is (FR, §5). The
PSR is Schopenhauer's formulation of the ways in which human
beings cognitively condition the world of representation. It includes
space, time and causality, as well as psychological, logical and
mathematical forms of explanation.

By contrast, aesthetic experience consists in the subject's
achieving will-less [willenlos] perception of the
world. In order for the subject to attain such perception, her intellect must cease viewing things in the ordinary
way—relationally and ultimately in relation to one's
will—she must “stop considering the Where, When, Why and
Wherefore of things but simply and exclusively consider the
What” (WWR I, 201). In other words, will-less
perception is perception of objects simply for the understanding of
what they are essentially, in and for themselves, and without regard to
the actual or possible relationships those phenomenal objects have to
the striving self.

Schopenhauer characterizes the subject who has aesthetic experience
as the “pure subject of cognition.” It is
“pure” in the sense that the subject's intellect is
not operating in the service of the will to life during aesthetic
experience, though this subject is still embodied—for
without embodiment, without the senses, a subject would not perceive at
all (WWR I, 198). Thus, while the pure subject of cognition is
free temporarily from the service of the individual will, it is
nonetheless still identical with the embodied subject of willing. The
freedom of the intellect from the service to the individual will
constitutes a sort of acting ‘out of character’. Exactly how the
intellect can cease to serve the individual will remains murky, however (More on this at 4.5; for a detailed account of
role of freedom in Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory, see Neill and
Shapshay 2012).

Similar to the notion of disinterested pleasure in Kant, in
Schopenhauer's aesthetics the subjective side of aesthetic
experience involves the will-less pleasure of tranquility. The
experience of aesthetic tranquility stands in stark contrast with
ordinary willing. All willing, according to Schopenhauer, involves
suffering, insofar as it originates from need and
deficiency. Satisfaction, when it is achieved affords a
fleeting joy and yields fairly quickly to painful boredom, which is
tantamount to a deficiency, and which starts the entire process anew.
Given this grim account of willing, it is not surprising that
Schopenhauer describes aesthetic experience in truly rapturous terms as
“the painless state that Epicurus prized as the highest good and
the state of the gods,” and as “the Sabbath of the penal
servitude of willing” when the “wheel of Ixion stands
still” (WWR I, 220).

The objective side of aesthetic experience is necessarily correlated
and occurs simultaneously with aesthetic will-lessness: It is the
perception of what Schopenhauer terms the “Platonic
Ideas.” The will qua thing in itself, on
Schopenhauer's metaphysics, objectifies itself at particular
grades; the Ideas correspond to these grades of objectification. The
Idea in each particular thing is that which is enduring and essential
in it (WWR I, 206) and can only be intuited in aesthetic experience of
nature and art (WWR I, 182).

The ontological status and the coherence of the Ideas within
Schopenhauer's metaphysics has been a bone of contention for
commentators (see Hamlyn 1980, Chapter 6; Young 1987, 2005;
Atwell 1995). The problem is this: On Schopenhauer's account
there are only two aspects of the world, first, the world as will (the
thing in itself or “will”); and, second, the world as
representation. The Ideas, however, fit neatly into
neither aspect. On the one hand, the Ideas seem to
belong to the world as will: In virtue of their being the
“immediate and therefore adequate objecthood of the thing in
itself” (WWR I, 197) the Ideas are independent of the cognitive
conditions of time, space and causality (WWR I, 204). Yet, unlike the
will qua thing in itself, the Ideas may be directly perceived
by a subject, and thus are more akin to representations. In
contrast to ordinary representations, however, the Ideas revealed in
the phenomenal object have not yet entered into the particularlizing
forms of the PSR (most notably, space, time and causality), they are
rather universals.

A further difficulty for the tenability of the Ideas in
Schopenhauer's system is the fact that he often refers to Ideas
in the plural. For Schopenhauer, space and time are the
principium individuationis; but since the Ideas are
independent of space and time, it is not clear how they can be
individuated at all. One option for understanding the place of the
Ideas in his system would be to see them as playing the role of an
epistemic rather than metaphysical bridge between the one will and the
many phenomena. This helps to explain their individuated status
as follows: In a suggestive metaphor, Schopenhauer likens the Ideas to
“steps on the ladder of the objectivation of that one will, of
the true thing in itself” (WWR I, 198); if one understands the
“ladder”—the ensemble of Ideas—as part of the
world as representation, then each Idea—each “step” on the
ladder—is a universal perceived in various particular
spatiotemporal objects. The Ideas then are the essential features of
objects or states of affairs that human beings may perceive when their
attention is focussed squarely on the ‘what’ rather than on
the ‘why’ or ‘wherefore’ of phenomena. It
should be noted, however, that the Ideas are not abstracted by the
subject as are concepts on Schopenhauer's view, but are, rather,
perceived directly in them. In sum, the Ideas seem to
make the most sense within his system as “abstract
objects”—objects that are not spatiotemporal, which do not
stand in causal relationship with anything, and which have not been
abstracted like a concept, but rather, are the real, objective, essential aspects
of the world as representation as perceived by a will-less subject (WWR
I, 234, 236). The crucial role that they play in
Schopenhauer's system is that they are the objects of all
aesthetic experience—both of the artist and spectator—and their
perception constitutes insight into the essential nature of the
phenomenal world.

When the subject's transition to the tranquil, will-less state
of aesthetic contemplation occurs easily, that is, when the objects
“meet that state halfway,” becoming “representatives
of their Ideas by virtue of their intricate and at the same time clear
and determinate form” (WWR I, 225), then the subject experiences
the beautiful. Natural objects, especially flora, accommodate
themselves most easily to the experience of the beautiful.

However, objects can be resistant to aesthetic contemplation in two
main ways: either they may be stimulating to the bodily appetites or
they may be hostile in some way to the human will to life.

The first category of contemplation-resistant objects, Schopenhauer
terms, “the stimulating” or the “charming”.
These may be positively or negatively stimulating. On the positive
side, he gives as examples, “prepared and table-ready dishes,
oysters, herring, lobster, bread and butter, beer, wine, etc.”
(WWR I, 232). Since he holds that these necessarily stir
the appetite, they inevitably resist aesthetic contemplation and are
therefore unsuitable to be presented in works of art such as still-life
paintings.

Along the same lines, a calculatedly-arousing treatment of
nudes—what we might today put on a spectrum of pornography—for
Schopenhauer, prevents aesthetic contemplation because it inevitably
excites lust and thus runs counter to the proper goals of art.
Schopenhauer may have room in his aesthetic theory for erotic
art, but this is not a topic which he explicitly addresses.

On the negatively stimulating side fall objects which are
disgusting. For reasons parallel to those offered with respect to the
positively stimulating, disgusting objects should also be banished from
art, because they necessarily arouse intense negative willing or
“repugnance”. Ugliness, however, is not identical to the
disgusting, need not lead to repugnance and has, for Schopenhauer, a
legitimate place in art. Curiously, it seems that for both the
positively and negatively stimulating Schopenhauer does not believe
that we may intellectually detach ourselves from our attraction, lust
or repugnance in order to contemplate these aesthetically. But
the grounds on which he holds this view remain somewhat obscure (for
more on this topic see Neill, forthcoming).

The other class of contemplation-resistant “objects” or
phenomena are those that bear a hostile relationship to the
human will insofar as they are so vast or powerful that they threaten
to overwhelm the human individual or reduce his existence on this
planet to a mere speck. Schopenhauer gives as examples desert
landscapes, cascades, and the starry night sky, among many others.
Unlike the case of the stimulating, however, Schopenhauer does believe
that aesthetic contemplation of these phenomena is possible, and when
it transpires the experience is that of the sublime.

Following Kant's distinction, Schopenhauer identifies
two varieties of the sublime, the dynamical and the mathematical. They
are distinguished by the nature of the threat posed to human willing in
general: if physical, then, for Schopenhauer, it is a case of the
dynamical sublime; if psychological, then it is a case of the
mathematical sublime. Although the sublime may be experienced with
works of art—notably with tragedy—most of Schopenhauer's
examples come from nature and include a variety of landscapes and
natural phenomena ranging from a frozen winter landscape which affords
very little warmth and light to a violent storm at sea. He arrays them
in terms of degrees of the sublime feeling they are likely to afford.
The higher the magnitude of the threat posed, the higher the degree of
sublime feeling.

Schopenhauer offers a phenomenologically-complex account of how we
may take aesthetic pleasure in such fearsome or overwhelming scenes. In
order to contemplate the Ideas in hostile objects aesthetically, the
subject must first acknowledge the fearsomeness or the sheer vastness
of the object, but then “consciously turn away” from the
threat, “violently wrenching himself free from his will”
(WWR I, 226). If the subject can do this, and achieves will-less
contemplation of the Ideas which express themselves in these
threatening things, then the subject experiences a “state of
elevation”—this is the feeling of the sublime.

Although Schopenhauer is not terribly explicit on the
phenomenological differences between the beautiful and the sublime, two
emerge from his account: (1) the beautiful is characterized by a
loss of self-consciousness whereas the sublime is
characterized by two moments of self-consciousness; (2) the
beautiful is wholly pleasurable, but the sublime is mixed with
pain.

While Schopenhauer refers to a kind of self-consciousness that
remains in the experience of the beautiful, the factthat (1) one is somehow freeing one's intellect
from the service of the will, and (2) one's perception is no
longer in the service of the individual's will are not
themselves present to mind in his account of the beautiful.
However, in experience of the sublime, these two additional elements of
self-consciousness—consciousness of liberating oneself and
consciousness of having been liberated from the will and its
cares—are present, and these instances of second-order
consciousness are accompanied by the feeling of
“exaltation” [Erhebung] above the will
[über den Willen] (WWR I, 233). The
pleasure of exaltation is thus tied to the felt recognition of the
subject's power to detach from the pressures of his or her
individual will, and is resonant of the Kantian account of the sublime,
with its felt recognition of one's rational-moral vocation and
freedom (for a fuller account of this interpretation see Shapshay
2012; for competing accounts of the Schopenhauerian sublime see Neill,
forthcoming; Vandenabeele 2003; Janaway 1996; Young 1987; Wicks 2008).

The sublime plays a significant role in Schopenhauer's theory
of tragedy and his solution to the ‘rationality problem’ of
tragedy, namely, how can we rationally take pleasure in witnessing
terrible scenes and feeling the painful emotions of fear and pity that
are integral to an experience of tragic drama? In addition to the high
cognitive value of this genre, Schopenhauer regards the pleasure of
tragedy as the highest degree of the feeling of the dynamically sublime
(WWR II: 433). These two facets of Schopenhauer's account of
tragedy help explain the rationality of engaging with tragic drama as
well as the often-noted ethical significance of the genre (see
section 5.2.4 for more on tragedy).

Pleasure in aesthetic experience comes from three main sources in
Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory. First, there is the tranquility
of will-lessness (this is the predominant pleasure of the beautiful);
second, is the pleasure of self-conscious exaltation over the will to
life, a pleasure akin to Kantian pride or respect for one's
rational-moral vocation (though Schopenhauer repudiates Kant's
view of pure practical reason); and a third kind of pleasure derives
from the perception of Ideas, but is distinct from tranquility.

Schopenhauer holds that the pleasure will come sometimes more from
the subjective and other times more from the objective side of
aesthetic experience. When the Ideas perceived objectify lower
grades of the will qua thing in itself, the pleasure will
derive more from the experience of will-less tranquility, as the Ideas
are not too significant. However, when the Ideas objectify higher
grades of the will—meaning more complex and complete
objectifications of the will—then the pleasure will derive more
from the cognitive significance of these Ideas. The hierarchy in
the gradations of the will's objectification has far-reaching
implications for Schopenhauer's philosophy of art and for the
hierarchy he posits among art forms and genres.

A thorny interpretive issue arises from Schopenhauer's account
of aesthetic experience thus far, namely, how is it even possible in
his system (see Hamlyn 1980, Neymeyr 1995, and Neill 2008)? The
problem is that aesthetic experience seems to require the breaking free
of the intellect from its service to the will to life. But according to
Schopenhauer, the intellect comes into being originally as a tool for and, as a rule, serves the needs of the will to life. He holds further that nature
does nothing in vain. So it would seem that the intellect
cannot actually break from the will, but if this is so, then
aesthetic experience would not be possible. Ultimately, this issue is
bound up with the possibility of human freedom more generally in
Schopenhauer's thought.

In his prize-winning essay “On the Freedom of the Will,”
Schopenhauer follows Kant in espousing a kind of compatibilism.
Nature is deterministic but the possibility of freedom
is guaranteed by the “in itself” of the world which is
independent of the PSR and is in that way undetermined (see Shapshay,
2011 for an account of Schopenhauer's fuller argument for this
claim). In all of his works after the 1813 dissertation, however,
Schopenhauer parts ways with Kant's view of “causality
through freedom” through a noumenal self. The possibility
of aesthetic freedom is nonetheless vouchsafed by the transcendental-idealist
doctrine of the distinction between the empirical and intelligible
character. By virtue of the ‘two-sidedness’ of the
individual's character, the individual can have transcendental/moral
freedom, for Schopenhauer views the intelligible character as the act of the free will qua thing in itself [Willensakt]

whose appearance,
when developed and drawn out in time, space and all of the forms of the
principle of sufficient reason, is the empirical
character…. (WWR I, section 55, 316)

Exactly how
the intellect may detach from the interests of the individual
will—the empirical character— by virtue of the intelligible character is difficult, perhaps
impossible, to say, though Schopenhauer is clear that the operation of
transcendental freedom should not be understood as causal since causality
applies only within the empirical realm.

Nonetheless, in cases of aesthetic experience (especially the
sublime) the intellect does manage to free itself from the
servitude of the will. Further, in cases of ascetic
“salvation” from embodied existence, a person may even will
to resign herself from willing altogether. Clearly there are actual
moments of human freedom in his view, the possibility of which is
vouchsafed through the intelligible character and its near identity to
the will qua thing in itself; but exactly how freedom
‘enters into’ the empirical realm in these cases remains,
in Schopenhauer's terms, quoting Malebranche, “a
mystery” (WWR I, section 70, 431; see also FW epigraph).

As in Kant's aesthetics, genuine art on
Schopenhauer's view is the product of a genius or someone who has
been “momentarily inspired to the point of genius” (WWR I,
261). But he construes the creative process of the genius rather
differently from Kant. For all of the fine arts save for
music—which constitutes an important exception treated
below—the genius produces art first by contemplating an Idea in
nature or from human affairs. Sometimes the genius is aided by her
imagination which allows her to perceive Ideas in possible as well as
in actual experience. Then, with technical skill she embodies the
Ideas she has perceived into a form (be it in marble, paint or words on
the printed page) that enables the Ideas to be perceived by others.
In this way, the genius lends her superlative ability to perceive
Ideas in actual or imagined things to the ordinary person, who can less
readily perceive Ideas from the phenomenal world.

Schopenhauer sees a relationship between genius and madness.
He believes that “every increase in intellect beyond the
ordinary measure is an abnormality that disposes one to madness”
(WWR I, 215); since the genius is distinctive for her superfluity of
intellect (WWR I, 211), which allows her to withdraw from mundane
concerns more often and more sustainedly in order to perceive the Ideas
in things and in the patterns of human life, she is thus disposed to
madness. Also, geniuses resemble madmen insofar as they are often
so engrossed in perceiving the essential in life that they pay little
attention to particulars, and are generally terrible in practical
affairs. But the real distinguishing factor between the
“madman” and the genius has to do with memory. From
his “frequent visits to madhouses” and his reflections on
the symptoms of these real inmates as well as on those of characters in
literature who have gone insane (e.g., Ophelia, King Lear, Ajax),
Schopenhauer hypothesizes that the mad lack reliable interconnections
between past and present events, and in many cases this is due to some
traumatic event they have suffered in their past. By contrast,
the genius has a memory that functions normally.

The differences among the fine arts (again, apart from music) have
to do with the medium in which Ideas are copied and through which they
may be perceived by other subjects and thus transmitted. But the fine
arts also differ and admit of a hierarchy based on the hierarchical
“ladder” of the Ideas that those art forms (and within art
forms, genres) are suited to express. Climbing the ladder of the
will's objectification in Ideas from lowest to highest is a
matter of the increasing complexity and completeness in the
will's phenomenal expression. And so, the same holds for the fine
arts—again, with the exception of music—whose sole aim, for
Schopenhauer, is to copy the Ideas and thus for the genius to make them
intuitively perceptible to others.

5.2.1 Architecture and Artistic Fountainry

On the lowest rung of the fine-arts ladder, Schopenhauer places
architecture which

make[s] the objectivation of the will clear
at the lowest level of its visibility, where it shows itself as the
dull striving of mass, conforming to law but with no cognition.
(WWR I, 283)

The Ideas embodied in architecture are mass, gravity,
rigidity, light, and the Ideas of the materials utilized such as stone
or wood. On the same rung Schopenhauer places artistic fountainry, the
aim of which is to reveal the objectivation of the will in fluid
substances; this art form embodies the Ideas of fluidity, formlessness,
transparency, and the like.

5.2.2 Landscape gardening

Moving up the ladder, Schopenhauer treats landscape gardening which
“performs the same service for the higher levels of vegetable
nature” that architecture and fountainry perform for non-living
nature (WWR I, 243). The aim of this fine art is to promote the
scenic beauty of an area by cultivating a variety of species in a
juxtaposition and combination that allows the essential in each type of
plant to emerge distinctly. Schopenhauer remarks, however, that
the landscape gardener exerts less control over her materials than does
the architect, and thus, the real beauty of this art form is due more
to nature herself than to the artist.

5.2.3 Sculpture and Painting

Arriving at the art forms which portray sentient, living nature,
Schopenhauer places paintings and sculptures of non-human animals on
equal footing. These fine arts also treat the human form and
enable the perception of the Idea of humanity including the
individuality of the sitter or subject, in the case of portraiture and sculpture. Capturing the individuality of human beings is
important for the expression of the Idea of humanity “because to
a certain extent, the human individual as such has the dignity of an
Idea of his own” (WWR I, 251).

Within painting, Schopenhauer follows for the most part the
hierarchy of genres set out by Academic painting at the time, classing
still-life and landscape painting below historical and genre
painting. This ranking is due to the lower grades of the
will's objectification in the usual subjects of still-life and
landscape painting: fruits, flowers, animal carcasses, natural
vistas and the like. But he departs from the traditional hierarchy of
Academic painting in his claim that the commoners and mundane scenes of
genre paintings are in no way inferior to grand historical figures and
events as subjects of painting,

because what is genuinely
significant in historical subjects is not in fact what is individual,
not the particular event as such, but rather what is universal in it,
the aspect of the Idea of humanity that expresses itself through
it. (WWR I, 257)

Thus, portrayals of peasants in a tavern
arguing over cards and dice is apt to be just as significant as
portrayals of ministers in a palace arguing over maps and countries
(WWR I, 256). In fact, he believes an artist would do very well
solely to concentrate on the scenes, events, struggles and joys of the
masses in order to unfold the multifarious Idea of humanity in
painting, sculpture or poetry.

The aim of poetry, in which Schopenhauer includes all forms of
literature and drama, is to reveal and communicate the Ideas through
the medium of abstract concepts communicated by means of words.

Schopenhauer uses an analogy from chemistry to describe the aim of
the true poet. Just as the chemist combines various liquids in
order to distill out precisely the solid precipitates she wants, the aim
of the poet is to use abstract concepts but to restrict the generality
of these concepts (by the use of epithets and other vivid descriptors)
to “precipitate” out precise images in the minds of her
readers, listeners, or spectators (WWR I, 269). The generality of
its material—the concept—allows poetry to express a vast
number of Ideas. It can range over all of nature, but is
especially apt to express the Idea of humanity in their actions,
thoughts, and feelings. And in expressing this Idea in its
multiplicity, poetry has a distinct advantage over history, according
to Schopenhauer (here following Aristotle), for poetry is not beholden
to actual events and people, but rather to what is possible or probable
and thus may better capture what is truly significant in human
existence.

The various genres of poetry express different facets of the Idea of
humanity: lyric poetry (including song) expresses the interior thoughts
and feelings of humanity as a whole; the novel, epic and drama
are more “objective” types of literature which express the
Idea of humanity through the portrayal of significant characters in
significant situations. On the top rung of poetic art, for
Schopenhauer, lies tragedy, whose goal is the “portrayal of the
terrible aspect of life” where “the unspeakable pain, the
misery of humanity, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful domination
of chance, and the hopeless fall of the righteous and the innocent are
brought before us” (WWR I, 280).

Schopenhauer sees great cognitive as well as ethical significance in
the Ideas expressed in tragedy, for this genre offers
“significant intimation as to the nature of the world and of
existence” and shakes a person's natural tendency toward
optimism. The one constant in tragedy is the “portrayal of
a great misfortune” (WWR I, 281), but this may be brought about,
on his account, in three main ways: (1) through the exceptional
wickedness of certain characters (he gives as examples of this type
Shakespeare's Richard III, Othello, and The
Merchant of Venice, as well as Sophocles' Antigone
among others); (2) through blind fate (e.g., Sophocles'
Oedipus Tyrannus, “most of the tragedies of the
ancients,” Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet,
Voltaire's Tancred and Schiller's The Bride of
Messina); (3) through morally ordinary characters in their typical
relationships with each other. This last type of tragedy is the most
valuable, for Schopenhauer,

because it shows us the greatest
misfortune not as an exception, not as something brought about by rare
circumstances or monstrous characters, but rather as something that
develops effortlessly and spontaneously out of people's deeds and
characters, almost as if it were essential, thereby bringing it
terribly close to us. (WWR I, 282)

Tragedies of this type
are more rare and more difficult to execute. Good specimens of
this type include Goethe's Clavigo and Faust,
Shakespeare's Hamlet in Hamlet's relationship
with Laertes and Ophelia. Although Schopenhauer obviously did not live
to see them, it is probable that he would have approved of Arthur
Miller's modern tragedies such as All My Sons and
Death of a Salesman which seem to fall entirely into this type
(for more on Schopenhauer's theory of tragedy and his solution to
the problems of tragedy see Tanner 1998; Neill 2003; Young 1987
& 1992; and Shapshay 2012b).

No wonder that Schopenhauer was the darling of composers in the
19th and 20th centuries, for he argued that music
has a truly exceptional status among the arts and uniquely reveals the
essence of the “in itself” of the world. Music that
affords such insight—the only music he deems worthy of the
name—is Classical/Romantic, non-programmatic music without a
text, or what was termed late in the 19th century,
“absolute music.” Unlike all of the other arts, which
express or copy the Ideas (the essential features of the phenomenal
world), Schopenhauer affirmed that music expresses or copies the will
qua thing in itself, bypassing the Ideas altogether.
This puts music and the Ideas on a par in terms of the directness
of their expression of the thing in itself (WWR I, 285). In order to
understand Schopenhauer's reasoning for this rather stunning view
of the cognitive significance of music, one needs to pay attention to
the role of feeling in Schopenhauer's epistemology, and
especially to the feeling of embodiment that a subject can experience
by attending to ordinary acts of volition.

It is the feeling of embodiment—the intuitive, immediate
knowledge that one wills when, for instance, one wills to
raise one's arm—that is monumentally significant for
Schopenhauer in his identification of the Kantian thing in itself with
will. First-personal knowledge that one wills is
immediate, rather than inferred from observation, according to
Schopenhauer, and is shorn of all of the forms of the PSR (including
space, causality, and even being-an-object-for-a-subject) with one
exception, the form of time.

Similarly, Schopenhauer holds that the experience of
“absolute” music (music that does not seek to imitate the
phenomenal world and is unaccompanied by narrative or text), occurs in
time, but does not involve any of the other cognitive conditions on
experience. Thus, like the feeling of embodiment, Schopenhauer believes
the experience of music brings us epistemically closer to the essence
of the world as will—it is as direct an experience of the will
qua thing in itself as is possible for a human being to have.
Absolutely direct experience of the will is impossible, because it will
always be mediated by time, but in first-personal experience of
volition and the experience of music the thing in itself is no longer
veiled by our other forms of cognitive conditioning. Thus, these
experiences are epistemically distinctive and metaphysically
significant.

Since the will expresses itself in Ideas as well as in music,
Schopenhauer reasons that there must be analogies between them.
Indeed, he draws out many such structural analogies: between the bass
notes of harmony and the lower grades of objectification of the will in
inorganic nature; between melody and the human being's
“most secret story,” that is, “every emotion, every
striving, every movement of the will, everything that reason collects
under the broad and negative concept of feeling” (WWR I, 287);
rhythms such as those of dance music are analogous to easy, common
happiness, while the allegro maestoso corresponds to grand,
noble strivings after distant goals; the “inexhaustibility”
of possible melodies is analogous to the “inexhaustibility of
nature in the variety of individuals, physiognomies and life
histories.” (WWR I, 288).

Notwithstanding these and many other analogies Schopenhauer draws
between music and the Ideas, he underscores the notion that music does
not imitate appearances, but rather expresses the will as directly as possible. It does this predominantly by
expressing universal feelings:

it does not express this or that
individual or particular joy, this or that sorrow or pain or horror or
exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy, sorrow,
pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in
themselves, abstractly…, (WWR I, 289)

He supports this account of music first as an inference to the best
explanation. By the third book of his main work, Schopenhauer
takes for granted that the reader has been at least somewhat convinced
by the metaphysics for which he has argued. In addition,
Schopenhauer holds that people often feel that music is the most
powerful of all the arts, affording a “profound pleasure with
which we see the deepest recesses of our nature find
expression.” And he draws our attention to what today we
might call, ‘the soundtrack effect,’ i.e.,

the fact
that, when music suitable to any scene, action, event, or environment
is played, it seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and
appears to be the most accurate and distinct commentary on it.
(WWR I, 262)

Finally, for Schopenhauer, “to the man who
gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony, it is as if
he saw all the possible events of life and of the world passing by
within himself” yet without being able to pinpoint any likeness
of events in life to the music he has experienced. Given all of
this, Schopenhauer believes his explanation—music is a copy of
the will qua thing in itself—is justified as an inference to
the best explanation of the experience, power and significance of music
in the lives of serious listeners. He believes that his
metaphysics of music finally does justice to the profound pleasure and
significance that the musically sensitive experience when
listening to truly great music.

In addition to this inference to the best explanation, Schopenhauer
also appeals to readers of his theory to check it against their own
experiences of music. And it is with respect to this second way
of supporting his account of music that, with admirable frankness, he
confronts the limits of his theorizing:

I recognize, however, that it is essentially impossible to
demonstrate this explanation [Aufschluß], for it assumes and
establishes a relation of music as a representation to that which of
its essence can never be representation, and claims to regard music as
the copy of an original that can itself never be directly represented.
Therefore, I can do no more than state here at the end of this third
book, devoted mainly to a consideration of the arts, this explanation
of the wonderful art of tones which is sufficient for me. I must leave
the acceptance or denial of my view to the effect that both music and
the whole thought communicated in this work have on each reader.
Moreover, I regard it as necessary, in order that a man may assent with
genuine conviction to the explanation of the significance of music here
to be given, that he should often listen to music with constant
reflection on this; and this again requires that he should be already
very familiar with the whole thought I expound. (WWR I, 257)

If a serious and sensitive listener heeds Schopenhauer's
advice and listens often to music with Schopenhauer's philosophy
firmly in mind, and this listener is still not convinced by
his theory, what then? Schopenhauer concedes that in this case
there is nothing more he can say.

Apparently, however, many serious and sensitive listeners and
composers have been somewhat swayed by his account of music. Of all of
the facets of Schopenhauer's aesthetics, none has exerted a
greater influence. The theory had a deep influence on Brahms,
Wagner, Mahler and Schönberg (see Goehr 1998, and Magee 1997, chapter
17), and is echoed in Susanne Langer's theory of musical
symbolism (Langer 1953; see also Alperson 1981). Analogizing
Schopenhauer's influence on musical aesthetics to
Beethoven's influence in classical music itself, Goehr avers that
Schopenhauer became “a central reference point” in the most
important debates in the history of musical aesthetics (Goehr, 1996:
200).

There are a number of connections that Schopenhauer explicitly (but
more often inexplicitly) drew between aesthetic experience and both his
ethics of compassion and salvation. In a strange but revelatory
passage at the end of section 35 of Book III, Schopenhauer puts these
words into the mouth of the ‘spirit of the earth’ [der
Erdgeist]:

True loss is just as impossible as true gain in this world of
appearance. Only the will exists: it, the thing in itself, is the
source of all those appearances. Its self-knowledge and its consequent
decision to affirm or to negate is the only event in itself. (WWR I,
207)

If one interprets this passage as espousing the view that the only
really free choice an individual has is to affirm or negate the will to
live after one has gained self-knowledge, then one can see a great
ethical significance for art and aesthetic experience in its
cognitive dimension in this thought, for it is only by way of aesthetic experience that one gains
intuitive knowledge of the Ideas, or, in the case of music, of the
nature of the will itself. Music especially involves feeling
universal emotions, emotions shorn of particular context, motive or
individual. In so far as we feel connected to all others on
the level of feeling, then music has a direct connection with
Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion, for the feeling that we are
indeed not ultimately separate individuals but are rather unified in
the in-itself of the world constitutes the basic intuitive knowledge at
the root of the ethical attitude of compassion.

Since aesthetic experience is the only way to gain true
understanding of the world and existence in all its multiplicity, this
means that aesthetic experience is a necessary pre-condition for making
the ethical choice as outlined in the quote above, to
affirm or deny the will, the “only event in itself”. Thus
the unique cognitive significance of art and aesthetic experience in
general turns out to have crucial ethical importance.

A second way in which aesthetic experience has ethical importance
for Schopenhauer is as an experience of negative freedom—freedom
from the servitude to the will to life. In the case of the
beautiful, one gains an experiential insight into a will-less state,
one in which the subject perceives the world in a non-egoistic manner.
Schopenhauer's ethics is based on taking a compassionate
stance on and acting for the benefit of others. So the experience
of aesthetic will-lessness affords some felt recognition of a necessary
first step on that path to compassion, namely, a non-egoistic
attitude.

Arguably, the experience of the sublime affords a felt
recognition not only of a subject's negative but also of her positive freedom, that is, a freedom to release herself from the service of the will to life. Thus, the self-consciousness involved in sublime experience affords a felt recognition of one's ability to change one's attitudes and behavior—actively to
turn one's attention away from one's egoistic strivings for a time.

The ethical relevance of the sublime is most apparent in
Schopenhauer's treatment of tragedy. In tragedy—the
highest degree of dynamically sublime feeling—one is both
confronted by terrible truths about the world and existence and
elevated by the sense that one is not utterly powerless in the face of
it. One comes to the felt recognition that one has the power to do
something in the face of the tragic nature of the world.
Schopenhauer recommends resignation (extreme denial of the will
to life) but his ethical theory admits of degrees of negation—by
acting in a less egoistic fashion or further in a truly compassionate
manner.

There is, of course, the other option: Affirmation of the will
to life in light of self-knowledge. This must be a genuine
option, for Schopenhauer, otherwise the choice to affirm or negate
would not constitute a true choice. Interestingly,
Schopenhauer spends little time exploring this option. Perhaps he
thought that anyone with true self-knowledge would experience
an anagnorisis or moment of tragic recognition, and, ashamed
and horrified at the will to life within him, would generally choose
negation over affirmation. It was left to Nietzsche and his
grappling with tragedy and pessimism, to question whether affirmation
might yet be a defensible option.

The World as Will and Representation (WWR I), volume I,
Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (eds.),
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [translation from the
3rd edition].

The World as Will and Representation (WWR II),
E.F.J. Payne (trans.), 3rd edition, 2 volumes. Dover: New
York, 1966.

Ferrara, Lawrence, 1996, “Schopenhauer on music as the
embodiment of Will,” In Dale Jacquette (ed.) Schopenhauer,
philosophy and the arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
183–199.

Gardiner, P., 1967, Schopenhauer, Middlesex: Penguin
Books.

Goehr, Lydia, 1996, “Schopenhauer and the musicians: an
inquiry into the sounds of silence and the limits of philosophizing
about music,” in D. Jacquette (ed.) Schopenhauer, Philosophy
and the Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
200–228.

–––, 1998. The Quest for Voice: On Music,
Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.